Before I get started, I would like to give credit where credit is due.

Here I give credit to my Mentors in the ways of the Silicon Arts.

My Father: DOS Skills and his patience for all the times I killed our two PC's.
My Uncle: Windows 9x Skills.
Library: For the vast amounts of books, and other reference materials I absorbed at inhuman rates.
Robert Allen: For many things I just did not know about life, computers, and for being not only a great teacher but a friend.
Peebles: How not to work an iMac Mouse.
Canuck: Networking, Tweaking, and CS Skills.
Sheena: "The Goddess of HTML", for helping me iron out some code.
TSS: How to sledgehammer a PC to death, Melt an AMD Athlon, and just about everything else that I didn't already know.

Ah, Yes of course, back to the topic at hand and the most important part....because a computer isn't much good when its just sitting around in a million pieces. This part of Architect seemed to take me forever to get to. It took me almost 2 months to acquire all the parts...then another 3 weeks before I could ever really get around to putting her together. Well as you can tell, I did finally get around to building her, as is evident in the headline. That was the initial bootup of Architect. There were a few snags and what not but, all in all the building process went smoothly.

There are pro's and con's to building your own computer yourself. The most obvious con is skill. This had been the first computer I had built from scratch, most of the ones I have "built" were pretty much there or had the main stuff already done for me. But this one I had to do on my own, and I will get into that later. There are several other con's but thats the main one, as far as acutally building it is concerned. The main pro, well there are two. Its both fun and a great teaching tool. I had a great time building architect and learned a lot, a lot more than what I already knew or picked up from reading stuff. All in all I highly suggest this activity to anyone is very computer inclined or just very curious/interested with computers. But as always, read and learn as much as possible.
Now to the nitty gritty stuff. Overall, Architect took me 4 hours to build. As I said earlier I did run into some snags. The biggest ones being the CPU/Heatsink Installation, Mounting the Mobo, Video Card Installation, and the Monitor. Well, installing the CPU was easy, it was a ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket, but the heatsink gave me major problems. I got it seated on the CPU right...but clipping it to the mobo required an insane amount of leverage and skill to lock it in place, took me a good 10 mins, but I got it done and correct on the first try. No biggie right?, lol. Mounting the mobo was hard because its just a plain awkward thing to do, but I did it after much thinking and searching for of screws shorter than what came with my case. Ah yes, the video card, what a wonderful one at which Architect sports as well. BUT installing it was a major pain, because it ate up a PCI slot, causing me to relocate a bunch of cards and cables. The fan for the GPU on the card sticks out just enough that it gives about 2-5mm clearence between itself and the card in the adjacent PCI slot, I thought about that for a good couple mins, and decided that a useless slot was worth the price of not melting my GPU. Problem fixed...the rest of the build went smoothly, got all the drives installed, and everything, booted her up, installed windows...you would think I was home free...so did I, but alas I was not. The monitor went out. Well it semi went out. I made a very audible pop, turned itself off, I promptly turned everything off, checked everything, which turned up to be cool. I rebooted and when the picture came on I knew instantly what happened. The picture tube had blown...the picture on the monitor was now so fuzzy I think even a person with the worst eyesight could read it, it was just horrible. So I ended up having to use the TV-OUT till my new one arrived, which was 3 days later, and its still working just fine. After all that its running just fine.

All in all it was a great learning experience, despite the setbacks, and I do say I would do it again. I had a blast and its great to be in control over what goes in MY PC, instead of picking from a list of what can go in there...although Dell and Alienware are the only two Distro PC's that I would buy, otherwise I say build it yourself.